Greg Clark, a giant Jesus, and a monumental goose ...

(Above: a giant Polish statue of Christ looking eerily Polish. Or perhaps Scandinavian).

When someone asks if they're being monumentally tacky, is it wrong to say "yes, you're being monumentally tacky", and a big doofus, and a big dork, and a big dingdong to boot?

Sure Greg Clarke is attempting a mild kind of humour in The big merino. The big prawn. Why no big Jesus? but instead of having his tongue in his cheek, he comes across like a boofhead in a rugby scrum with his head up a bum.

There's something unnerving, and unsettling about the megalomania of Christians and Christianity.

The news that the Poles have done over the Brazilians in turning out the world's most vulgar public piece of chintz tawdry gaudy flashy knickknackery in the form of a giant Jesus has got the punch drunk Clark's juices flowing. (not to mention the juices of Swiebodzin, nestling in the western Polish plains, and more here).

Where's the dinkum giant antipodean Jesus, Clark wants to know, given Australia's penchant for giant vulgar items.

According to Clark, Christianity is a "material faith":

That is, Christianity has visible outcomes in the world (it’s not just an ‘in your head’ religion), and so it is no surprise that Christians have built monuments of many kinds—churches, statues, libraries, hospitals, refuges, schools, universities.

Naturally this leads Clark to think a really big Jesus is a really good idea, really terrific and really meaningful, rooly trooly:

All of these are ‘visible signs’ of the ‘gospel’ of Jesus (that is, the message of Christianity and how it shapes what people do with their lives), and Christ the Redeemer is just a really, really big sign that we think Jesus is worth attention, and indeed demands the attention of anyone interested in faith, hope and love.

Or not, as the case may be, since frankly the giant prawn and the giant banana are not really the source of my regard for prawns and bananas. And there's a dark psychological side to gigantism which revolves around all kinds of religions, be they religious or secular, from Jesus through Hitler to Mao, as the cult of personality reigns supreme.

But do go on:

So does Australia need a ‘big sign’ of the significance of Jesus? Would a big Australian Jesus have any impact looking over Sydney Harbour, or the Yarra, or perhaps even our natural Big Thing, Uluru?

Yes, yes, that'd show exemplary cultural sensitivity and stir up those dreaming ants. By the way, while we're at it, can we re-christen the rock Ayers Rock, to remind us that Sir Henry Ayers, as well as being premier of South Australia five times, was a decent god fearing man who gave unto Adelaide Ayers House.

Why come to think of it, the garden at Ayers House would be the perfect site for a giant Jesus.

But hang on, hang on, I sense a problem:

I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:
thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;
A big, statuesque Jesus would provide a different image: strong, sovereign, protective. Both images are part of the biblical story of Jesus, and both have their place.

Yep, that bloody jealous god, bunging on a do about graven images and likenesses.

Muslims get a regular going over about not being able to show pictures of their prophet, but in the good old days, Christian fundies who took the bible literally had a grand old time ransacking Catholic churches and smashing statues, in the manner of the Red Guard or the Taliban taking an attitude to giant Buddhas.

To feel the the violence of the Protestant Reformation, one has to look at the scarred and broken statuary in Europe's medieval churches. Determined to destroy Roman Catholic imagery, iconoclasts in England went on a frenzy of destruction that lasted from 1536 to the death of Oliver Cromwell more than a century later.

“Their vandalism,” the art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon wrote in The History of British Art, “was evangelism.” They hacked off the faces, heads and noses of saints. They smashed stained glass, built bonfires of statues of the Virgin and slashed paintings. The scholar Lawrence Stone once said that the art historian of Britain's medieval period was a “palaeontologist, who from a jawbone, two vertebrae, a rib and a femur contrives to reconstruct the skeleton of some long- extinct creature and endow it with flesh”. (Enough sledge hammer conversions).

Ah yes, the good old days of Biblical literalism, where people believed in the bible, not just in the chunks that suited them (anyone mention gay marriage?)

These days graffiti and tagging is the preferred aesthetic commentary on urban extrusions, and what's the betting that a giant Jesus would cop a tag or four? Still, that'd all be fodder for the persecuted maligned megalomaniac Christians in our midst.

But seeing as how doing the graven images and likenesses thing might be an issue for three or four generations, perhaps we should settle for an abstract impressionist interpretation of Jesus. Perhaps we could bring back Jackson Pollock and get him to dribble and slash some paint to evoke without provoking the absent lord.

Clark would probably go for it, as he proposes co-opting artists into the game:

I’d be fascinated to see ‘Big Jesus’ projects in Australian cities. I’d like to see someone like Kaldor Public Art Projects pick up the idea of commissioning temporary installations in major cities and then asking journalists, poets, social commentators and the clergy to reflect on the impact of having a Big Jesus looking over their city for a period of time.

Big Jesus? Is that like a Big Mac? Note the cunning use of the words "temporary installations". By golly, that sounds positively artistic ... But why stop at a Big Jesus in a city? Why not do a big Jesus in space, Monty Burns style, which could block out the sun? That'd make people stand up and pay attention to Jesus ... And while we're at it, we could flood the world with a Strauss waltz so the Kubrick estate wouldn't sue, but take it as a homage ...

I’m sure others would like to see the impact of a Big Julia or Big Tony, or perhaps a Big Dawkins, but personally I’m interested in the Jesus effect. Or am I just being monumentally tacky?

Which is where we came in, with Clark being monumentally tacky in a monumentally goosey way.

I know he only scribbled it to tease and provoke, but in the process, a depressing vacuity also reveals itself.

But here's a deal. He can have his giant Jesus if we can have a giant skull in each Australian city, full of Christians tortured for their desire to use graven images and likenesses, especially of a Scandinavian kind when trotted out to represent a Jew of ancient middle eastern semitic stock ...

(Below: Bosch with the right idea).

(Or how about a giant shoe in every town? That would get the shoe fetishists going. Zongshan Park in China, naturally).